Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845-1850

Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845-1850

Susan Campbell Bartoletti

2001 * p. 172 * YA Nonfiction

Black Potatoes gives a history of the potatoe famine in Ireland. I learned much. One of the phrases that struck me was that it was a "man-made famine." It wasn't that there was no food, but rather that people didn't have any money to buy food.

Bartoletti explains many circumstances around the famine: the tension between England and Ireland, between Protestants and Catholics, between Landlords and laborers.

There are many quotes and experiences that are included by Famine survivors and relatives, most of them heartbreaking. For instance, an account of a woman that begged for money to buy a coffin for her dead infant. It is truly a humbling book. I will never look at a bag of potatoes the same again.

So many politics, and political mistakes by England, escalated the famine. An airborne, foreign fungus rotted the potatoes literally overnight. Since harvesting potatoes is what farmers survived on, most were left desitute. Everyone, mostly the laborers, were starving. When they tried to eat corn that England imported for them after months of starvation, the kernels ruptured their sensitive intestines and killed many of them. Landlords evicted residents from their homes. People ate whatever they could find: rats, cats, dogs. Disease spread. And much, much more. Truly, horrible.

The book is informative without feeling like a textbook. There are many illustrations included, most of them sketches from newspapers that reported on the famine.

-Reading level: grade 9 & up

-Big words are explained and have pronunciations

-Many illustrations

-Some disturbing details and stories

-A good segue into talking about the Irish Famine or as a supplementary text